The Right to Development and the Origins of the New International Economic Order

Daniel J. Whelan ‘‘Under the Aegis of Man’’: The Right to Development and the Origins of the New International Economic Order On September 23, 1966, the Senegalese foreign minister Doudou Thiam gave an impassioned speech to fellow delegates assembled in New York for the opening of the 21st Session of the United Nations General Assembly.1 It began as a reflection on the preceding twenty years of UN history. Despite some modest progress that the UN had achieved in meeting its three primary objectives—the maintenance of peace; the liberation of colonized peoples; and the economic and social development of mankind—this period was more notably exemplified by failures and setbacks: the war in Southeast Asia; the failure of decolonization in Southern Rhodesia and South Africa; and the failure to meet the goals of the UN’s first ‘‘Development Decade.’’2 It was on this third point that Thiam ruminated for the remainder of his speech. The achievement of political and legal sovereignty by newly decolonized states did not resolve the existing imbalance of power between the developing and developed worlds. Thiam cited growing inequality in the share of global income between developed and underdeveloped countries: in 1938, the income disparity was 15:1;by1966 it was 35:1, and projected to be 40:1 by 2000. Thiam insisted that this phenomenon of underdevelopment was not determined by geography or race; it was mobile, moving about in time and space. Western pros- perity vis-a`-vis the Middle East, India, and China was historically recent, and the so- called poor nations were not as poor as they were said to be: in 1963 they held 50 percent of the world’s petroleum, nearly half the copper and manganese ore, and 70 percent of the world’s diamonds. The same was true of their share of agricultural commodities. The problem, Thiam argued, lay in the inequitable international division of labor and deterioration in the terms of trade since 1950. In the postwar global economy, the underdeveloped countries had taken on the role of producers of raw materials and importers of finished goods: ‘‘In theory, the old colonial pact was doubtlessly abol- ished at the end of the last century, but in practice it has been maintained for a long time . An actual pillage of the developing countries has been organized on a world- wide scale.’’3 Thiam called upon developing countries to act: the time had come to organize an ‘‘economic Bandung Conference’’—a reference to the 1955 Afro-Asian summit that exemplified a newly emerging spirit of postcolonial unity and solidarity. The last part of Thiam’s speech is worth reproducing in its entirety, for it introduced a novel and revolutionary concept: 93 ................. 18697$ $CH7 02-20-15 14:22:28 PS PAGE 93 What is our task? We must lay the foundations for a new world society; we must bring about a new revolution; we must tear down all the practices, institutions and rules on which international economic relations are based, in so far as these practices, institutions and rules sanction injustice and exploitation and maintain the unjustified domination of a minority over the majority of men. Not only must we reaffirm our right to development, be we must also take the steps which will enable this right to become a reality. We must build a new system, based not only on the theoretical affirmation of the sacred rights of peoples and nations but on the actual enjoyment of these rights. The right of peoples to self-determination, the sovereign equality of peoples, international solidarity—all these will remain empty words, and, forgive me for saying so, hypocritical words, until relations between nations are viewed in the light of economic and social facts. From this point of view, the facts contradict the principles. The new world vision which the Charter of the United Nations held out to us is still only a vision. It has not yet become an international reality. The economic Bandung Conference that we are proposing should enable us to formulate a new world economic charter. We shall attend, not in order to present a list of complaints, but to demand and claim what is ours, or, more precisely, what is due to man, whatever his nationality, his race or his religion. We must define a new revolutionary attitude which, starting with the somber realities of today, will guide us toward realities that are more in keeping with the ethics of the United Nations. This means that the Bandung we are proposing will not be a Bandung of hatred; it will be a Bandung of justice, balance and reason; it will be a Bandung held under the aegis of man.4 Thiam’s speech was the first official articulation of the concept of the ‘‘right to development’’ in the history of the United Nations. The language of rights is closely tied to demands for justice: in the case of the right to development, economic justice. Pleas for global economic justice began to gain traction in the late 1950s; they rose to the level of a ‘‘demand’’ by the mid-1970s, expressed in the Declaration on the Estab- lishment of the New International Economic Order, its accompanying Program of Action, and their companion, the Charter of the Economic Rights and Duties of States (CERDS), all of which the United Nations adopted with overwhelming majority (indeed lopsided) votes in 1974.5 This essay explores the normative origins of the NIEO and especially CERDS, as they first appeared in the form of the ‘‘right to development.’’ It will explore the emergence of the rhetoric, how it was deployed, and how it eventually transformed into what I would argue was a milder ‘‘demand’’ for a new charter of economic rights and duties of states. Paradoxically, while the right to development rhetoric grew and gained more adherents during various United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) summits, outcome documents from those meetings failed to embrace its principles in any robust fashion. By the early 1970s, advocates for the right to development were insisting upon its legal basis. But the NIEO and CERDS were largely devoid of normative, humanitarian rhetoric or principle. At the same time, just as the right to development gave way to the somewhat staid and boring sphere of international negotiations over trade and development, the idea of a right to development 94 Humanity Spring 2015 ................. 18697$ $CH7 02-20-15 14:22:30 PS PAGE 94 ‘‘jumped the tracks’’ from the NIEO process into the very willing arms of the UN’s Commission on Human Rights, where it was embraced with enthusiasm in the late 1970s. This essay focuses primarily on the first part of this story. The NIEO and CERDS were the culmination of nearly twenty years of conference diplomacy spearheaded by newly independent postcolonial states (organized into the ‘‘Group of 77’’) that exerted their emerging majority power in the UN system to fundamentally transform what they viewed as the unjust global trading and development order. The right to development—which was very closely associated with the right to self-determination and its economic constituent, the right to permanent sovereignty over natural resources—had animated many within the G-77, shaping its economic goals throughout the 1960s and early 1970s. The final resting place of this strand of the ‘‘right to development’’ was the 1974 Charter on the Economic Rights and Duties of States. Preludes Most historical accounts of the right to development locate its key origin in an inau- gural lecture given by the Senegalese jurist Ke´ba M’Baye to the International Institute for Human Rights (Strasbourg, France) in 1972 and then jump to the ‘‘reiteration’’ of the right by the Commission on Human Rights in 1979, starting a process which eventually culminated in the 1986 UN Declaration on the Right to Development.6 Some of the very early literature on the right to development fills out the story a bit more, but most accounts largely dispense with historical questions and begin with the formation of the Working Group on the Right to Development in 1981.7 On its face, this is not surprising, given that the original ‘‘right to development’’ was clearly not a human right (indeed, some argue that the contemporary version fails on that score as well).8 As articulated by Doudou Thiam in 1966, the right to development was framed within an emerging postcolonial critique of the dominant strand of development thinking after World War II—‘‘modernization theory’’—which was first fully articulated in W.W. Rostow’s ‘‘take-off’’ model of economic growth published in 1960.9 This development paradigm, in which national economies pass through various stages—from preindustrial ‘‘traditional’’ society toward high- consumption, fully industrialized modernization—was challenged by many Third World states that were influenced by dependency theorists (such as Rau´l Prebisch, who was UNCTAD secretary-general from 1963 to 1969). Dependency theory maintained that declining terms of trade thwarted developing countries from moving out of production and trade of primary goods. While critical of this dominant development model, challengers nevertheless still subscribed to the notion that trade was the primary engine of development, a stance that remained a centerpiece of development policy throughout this period (as, indeed, it continues to be today). It was a central goal of the NIEO to fundamentally alter this trade model—not to replace it. As a matter of justice, a fundamental root of the right to development (and, inci- dentally, its link to human rights) was the right to self-determination.

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